Jurriaan Molenaar

Biography of Jurriaan Molenaar

Jurriaan Molenaar (*1968) paints architecture: residential boulevards, industrial areas, banks and offices. Often empty spaces that offer a view to even more emptiness. A clear fascination can be recognized for the work of architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and their interaction with the relationship between inside and outside. For Molenaar, establishing connections between these two elements is essential. To achieve his goal, he uses sober, muted colors, labyrinthine perspectives, razor-sharp lines and an almost invisible brush.

He himself calls his way of painting "constructed realism", with no other storyline missing. He says: "In my 'buildings' the 'visitor' is given the silence and space as a gift. Architecture is not much more than walls and holes. But a wall has a double psychological charge: it insulates you and also offers protection. With a hole it's just like that: you can peek through it, but can also be looked at. I want to show all of that in my work. ”

The studio of Jurriaan Molenaar is extremely neat, the walls clean and straight, his large worktable tidy. On the floor are hundreds of pots of pigment, a sea of colour almost incongruous in this austere 'architecture studio'. Line, light and space define the image in the paintings of Jurriaan Molenaar.

This 'science-man' has mastered the laws of perspective and geometry down to the finest details. Windows in a wall, a swimming pool, an open door. They are like tests in traditional geometry with the complication of different vanishing points. Molenaar looks for leeway in the geometry, leeway in the perspective and the vanishing points, without, however, violating these. At first sight very realistically represented, further insight reveals that there is nevertheless a slight torsion in the shape of the swimming pool and the aspect of the window in the wall is almost implausible; leeway in what seems real. In Molenaar’s paintings colours are restrained and monochrome. In order to suggest depth or light he uses no changes of tone or colour. The areas of colour are, however, painted with extreme precision, and also remarkable sensitivity. And this is where the warmth lies, the poetry, for the contemplative viewer.